For Mom

Believe it our not, we preachers run out of things to say. Last week our lectionary texts were again from the gospel of John and the first letter of John and were about love. But I had just preached about love for the previous 2 Sundays and so I was grateful to focus on Rachel's Day. This week it's the same problem but It's Mother's Day. What do I say about Mother's Day that has not been said before? That moms love us and we should love them? That's obvious. So I am going about it in a different way.

When my dad was in his final illness and weeks from death, he asked my brother and I what we were going to say about him at the funeral. So we each presented our eulogies to him so he could read them ahead of time. My dad was clear-minded almost up to the end. My mom is suffering dementia. That's part of the reason I am going to be gone for a few weeks. So I thought I would do the same for her while she can still, I hope, understand it.

My mom was a brilliant woman who, though she had gotten a scholarship to college, was advised by her mother that higher education was not the proper path for a woman. So she became a nurse instead. But she continued to read voraciously and used to go weekly to our local library, take out the maximum number of books they allowed her and then go to a slightly more distant library and do the same. And she read at a phenomenal rate of speed. And she would share what she had learned. So I was always hearing about ideas, research, history and the like. My mom had a great impact on my intellectual development.

Not only did she read to us, she encouraged me to read to my brother at bedtime as soon as I was able. I still have a great reverence for books. Unlike her, I doubt I will read all the ones I have.

There is another way in which my mother encouraged my intellectual progress. She never let a sloppy thought go unchallenged. She didn't tolerate excuses; what you did or didn't do needed logical reasons to back them up. “I don't want to” or “I didn't feel like it” would not fly. Sometimes in life you have to do what you'd rather not or refrain from foolish things you wish to indulge in. You had to have a good reason for not doing what you ought to do and you had to be able to explain it. It made me a very logical and articulate person, though throughout my life I have come to acknowledge that people more often do things not for logical but for psychological reasons.

My mom was responsible for my spiritual interests. Besides more traditional bedtime stories, she also read to us from the Bible, mostly the gospels. It was she who decided that, after years of us not going to church, we needed to find one to attend. And she found a Presbyterian one, whose minister had a PhD and addressed topics with intellectual rigor. His sermons were very learned and very long. Which is why I keep mine to about 15 minutes. In a way, you can thank my mom for that.

Mom also introduced me to my favorite writer, C.S. Lewis. She passed onto me The Screwtape Letters, Lewis' shrewd look at the psychology of temptation and I was hooked. I've read just about everything he wrote. She also got me the Complete Sherlock Holmes for what I think was my 12^th birthday. And when the James Bond movies came out she got all the original novels and short stories and lent them to me, paperclipping a note over passages that she deemed too racy, telling me to go to the next chapter. Which I did because at that age the girls in the books were the least interesting part of his adventures.

This passing on of interests was fairly one-sided, though. Mom was never very interested in fantasy, horror, science fiction or other things I was into. She did however take such things into account when making birthday cakes. When I was getting a Lionel train set for my birthday, she made a train of cakes: engine, coal car, boxcar, flat car and caboose, and put them on rails made of licorice. When I got my own clock radio, she made a cake that looked like it. She teased me by showing it to me before it was iced. I tried to guess what my present was by its shape and failed. When I received my tome of Sherlock Holmes, she made a cake shaped like an open book and spelled out “Happy Birthday, Chris” in the Dancing Men code from one of the stories!

Mom was not only a very intellectual person but a creative one as well. Besides her cakes, she experimented with meals and cuisines. We might have Japanese food for dinner, complete with all the proper cups, bowls, and utensils. My brother and I learned to eat with chopsticks as kids.

Mom kept picking up crafts and hobbies: needlepoint, soap carving, chip carving, jewelry making, painting, Z-scale model trains so small that you could set up a layout of tracks and a village in an attache case and take it with you. She would get very deeply into each of these crafts, getting the instructional books and all the tools and supplies, make a few things and then move on. It got to where we told Mom to stop working on new gifts for our birthdays and Christmas and finish some of the old ones!

As I said, my mom was a nurse and so I had no fear of doctors or medical procedures. But neither did my brother or I get much sympathy when our injuries failed to reach the level of threatening life or quality of life. Possibly because she was head nurse of the recovery room, and had seen much, much worse than our scrapes and bruises. I don't remember her ever kissing boo-boos and making them better, but we did get excellent first-aid.

Mom was just as clinical with her own affliction: hearing loss. She never felt sorry for herself, though she listened to her record collection less and less. She loved music and singing when we were young. She did realize her hardness of hearing isolated her socially. She could talk to people one on one and through lip-reading make sense of the muffled sounds of their voice. But in crowded venues, the general indistinct roar of the crowds made it impossible for her to understand much. My own loud voice and ability to enunciate clearly I attribute to talking to her, as well as my vocabulary. Certain words are hard for the lipreader to distinguish, so it helps to have a lot of synonyms at your disposal.

I can remember just 3 things she did to accommodate her growing deafness. First, she got hearing aids. She had my brother and I tested for hearing loss and thus his was caught early in his life. The joke in the family was “Chris isn't hard of hearing; he just doesn't listen.”

Second, as it became obvious that she would not be able to continue as a practicing nurse, she went to college and got a degree in library science. She took care of the medical library at Jewish Hospital, where she spent virtually her whole career, and later, was their tumor registrar, a key position for any hospital wanting to be accredited for treating cancer. So vital was she that, after years of asking for an assistant went unheeded, she announced her early retirement. She was persuaded to stay on condition that she get an apprentice who could one day succeed her.

Third, she got a helper animal. This happened after a forklift backed over her in a warehouse hardware store. The operator failed to look behind him and she failed to hear his machine. She broke her pelvis in 3 places. Eventually she got a yappy little Pomeranian, named Pretty Boy, to alert her to things around her.

Her disability did get her and the family onto the internet earlier than most people. While we could and did talk over the phone using the Telecommunication Device for the Deaf technology, with the internet we could email each other without the awkwardness of waiting for someone from Missouri Rehab retyping what we said. She bought us our first computer for that purpose.

My mother is largely responsible for who I am: a nurse, a reader, a lover of music, a person equally comfortable with science and theology, a creative person who is also very logical, a person who can bounce back from adversity and deal with it matter-of-factly. I am deeply grateful to her.

We all have mothers. They all have strengths that they have passed on to us and weaknesses as well. But a mother's job is perhaps the most difficult one in the world. We each start as a part of our mother's body. She has to expel that part, in great pain, and then nourish it and raise it and guard it and teach it. She has to take 100% responsibility for its welfare and then, slowly give that up so that her child can become an independent individual. No one gets that completely right. And yet the fact that the majority of human beings do manage to live relatively responsible lives and navigate this world without causing it or the people around them grievous harm is a tribute to the fact that most mothers get it mostly right.

I hope my reminiscences about my mother have sparked memories of your own mother. I hope you see in yourself the gifts of strengths and temperament and skills that she gave you. If she is still in this world, let her know your gratitude for what she has done for you. Forgive her for the ways in which she was not quite up to this impossible task. Show her love for all the love she has showered on you. If she is with God, thank him for giving her to you.

The Bible says we are all descended from one mother. Mitochondrial DNA shows that to be literally true. And yet Mother's Day is just 110 years old, less if we go by the year Woodrow Wilson made it an official US holiday. Odd that it took so long for us to honor the person whose body we once belonged to. And the woman who started Mother's Day, Anna Jarvis, turned against it in less than a decade because of its commercialization. She would rather people expressed their love and gratitude to their mothers through heartfelt handwritten letters.

This is mine to my mom. I hope at this point she understands it or at least grasps the sentiment behind it. And I hope that your mom will feel the same about however you express your love. Because we just don't do it enough. And one day it will be too late.

Rachel and Her Children

The scriptures referred to are Jeremiah 31:15-17.

Let's call him Jason. I get there and he is lying in bed, the TV on. His fingers are curled and his wrists bent in an unnatural way. It's what happens to your hands when you can't control them because of a spinal injury. He can move his upper arms and uses the lowers arms as you might a stick to move things with his unresponsive hands and to press his palm on the remote to operate the TV.

First I empty his urinary catheter and remove his adult diaper. I clean him up, give him a bed bath and check and change the dressings on his bedsores which are, thank God, healing. I dress him. I put a jacket on him because his thin frame gets cold. He tries to help with the sleeves but there's little he can do. Then I get his wheelchair, remove the left handrail, lock the wheels and closing my knees on either side of his, lift, pivot and transfer him into the chair. I adjust the air cushion that he sits on to protect him from developing future sores on his buttocks, put on the foot paddles and lift and position his feet on them. Then we wheel him to the kitchen so he can eat breakfast. I strap the prosthetic brace on his hand that allows him to hold a spoon and feed himself. He likes Lucky Charms cereal. He is 16.

Jason had been this way for 2 years, ever since he was shot in the cervical spine. He almost died. For some kids his age, his being a quadriplegic for the rest of his life is a fate worse than death.

Some kids do die from gunshots. If you are an American child or teen, you are 17 times more likely to die from gun violence than kids in other high-income countries. That's 1 child or teen every 3 hours and 15 minutes, 7 kids a day, 51 every week, more than 2600 a year. More than 6 times as many are injured, as Jason was, 18,270 of them a year, one kid shot every 30 minutes.

Today is Rachel's Day, observed by ELCA congregations. The reference is to Jeremiah 31:15-17, the first part of which goes, “This is what the Lord says, 'A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.'” The original context is about the exile of the kingdom of Israel. But its better known use is in reference to Herod's slaughter of male infants in Bethlehem, which wasn't too far from Rachel's tomb. (Matthew 2:16-18) Matthew reused this verse about a mother's bitter lament to underline a different tragedy and WELCA, which stands for Women of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, uses it for the ongoing tragedy in our land.

In 1994, the event began in Chicago when a member of Bethel Lutheran Church on the west side of Chicago urged her congregation to support children facing violence. And while its original focus was and is on gun violence, Rachel's Day also recognizes the roles abuse, neglect, drugs, hunger, poor health and poor education play in the deaths of children.

A report of child abuse is made every 10 seconds. 3.6 million referrals are made to child protection agencies every year, involving 6.6 million children. 5 children die every day from neglect or abuse. That's more than 1500 kids a year.

Those who survive aren't much better off. Abuse causes physical and mental health problems, like depression, that reach into adulthood. The abused child's risk for smoking, alcoholism and drug abuse is much higher. The odds they will be either a victim or a perpetrator of domestic violence as an adult increases. Sexually abused children have a higher probability of sexual and reproductive health issues. Abused or neglected children are 9 times more likely to get involved in criminal activity. You find twice the percentage of people who were abused as children in prison than you do in the general population. And abuse is not limited to the poor but can be found in any class.

That said, a child is more likely to be poor than an adult. 1 in 5 children in America (19%) lives in poverty and 2 in 5 (41%) children are living on the brink of poverty. That's nearly 30 million children, more than 5 million of whom are infants and toddlers. 1 in 30 children in the US is homeless. That's 2 ½ million kids, more than half of them under 6 years old.

Things like being poor, not knowing when you will eat next, being abused or neglected, losing a parent to death, divorce or prison, and the like are adverse childhood experiences that cause a lot of stress. And continual stress creates physical and mental problems in people, and especially in children. It physically changes the child's developing brain. Overloaded by stress hormones, such children are in fight, flight or freeze mode all the time. They can't learn in school. They have trouble trusting adults or developing healthy relationships with peers. They seek relief through alcohol, drugs, nicotine, high risk activities and sex with multiple partners. Children with 4 or more adverse childhood experiences (or ACEs) have a greater risk of chronic disease, violent behavior, becoming a victim of violence, depression and suicide. Those with 6 ACEs have an average life expectancy 2 decades shorter than those who report having none.

Shockingly, suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people aged 12 through 18. 14% of high school students have contemplated suicide and 7% have attempted it. And for every 100 attempts to kill themselves, 1 kid actually succeeds. Females attempt suicide more than 3 times as often as males; unfortunately, males die by suicide more than 4 times as often as females. Native American and Alaskan youth have the highest rates of death by suicide, with whites coming in second. LGBT youth have a higher suicide rate than their heterosexual peers. Nearly 82% of them have been harassed at school because of their sexual orientation and kids who are bullied are 2 to 9 times more likely to consider suicide.

Depressing, isn't it? What can we do?

When it comes to suicide, look for signs and symptoms. Mental illness and addictive disorders are associated with 90% of suicides. 60% of those who complete suicide suffered from depression; drug and alcohol abuse is a factor in ½ to 2/3s of suicides. Other clues include aggression and fighting, a lack of parental support, a home with high conflict and violence, problems at school, violence in the community, a family history of mental illness and suicide, self-mutilation, and usually a triggering event, like the death of a loved one, parental divorce, the end of a relationship or sexual abuse.

Then take practical steps. If you have someone who is suicidal in your home, and you have a gun in the house, take precautions. 2/3s of all gun deaths in this country are suicides. Make sure yours is unloaded, locked up and separate from the ammunition. Or you may decide to have a friend take your guns for a while for safekeeping. And you want to secure your guns even if you have healthy, happy kids in the house. A scary number of gun deaths are caused by toddlers who come across a loaded gun and unwittingly shoot either themselves or a sibling or friend, approximately 1 per week.

If you have drugs, you want to secure them as well. And not just the “hard” drugs. Remember that people have killed themselves with aspirin or Tylenol.

Those are just immediate measures to take. The chief thing to do is get your child professional help. I hope you have good insurance. Most plans ignore the fact that mental illnesses are in fact physical illnesses of the brain and usually offer less coverage.

And if everyone was that sensitive to their children's needs, maybe the other kinds of violence that children suffer would decrease as well. But that would be naive. And the adverse childhood experiences of others affect us all. Childhelp.org [here] says, “The long-term financial impact of abuse and neglect is staggering. For new cases in 2008 alone, lifetime estimates of lost worker productivity, health care costs, special education costs, child welfare expenditures and criminal justice expenditures added up to $124 billion.” According to a report by the Educational Testing Service [here], compared to those whose families make twice the poverty line, poor children complete 2 years fewer education, earn less than half as much money, earn $826 per year more in food stamps, and were nearly 3 times more likely to have poor health. Child poverty costs the United States $500 billion a year.

I hesitated to quote the monetary costs because that shouldn't be what motivates us. As parents our love for our children and our empathy for other children should be sufficient. As Christians the example of Jesus should inspire us. In Mark we are told, “And they were bringing children to him so that he might touch them but the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw this he was indignant and said to them, 'Permit the children to come to me; do not hinder them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all.' And he took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them.” (Mark 10:13-16) In Matthew Jesus says, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven continually see the face of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 18:10) “So it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones perish.” (Matthew 18:14) As it says in the Psalms, the book Jesus quoted most often, “Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed.” (Psalm 82:3)

What can we do? There are lots of organizations working on the various problems that affect our children which you can support as a volunteer or a donor. Contact Prevent Child Abuse America [here]. Compassion International [here] is a Christian organization that helps children around the world. Feeding America [here] works through a nationwide network of food banks to end hunger. Locally there's Lutheran Services Florida [here] and Episcopal Charities of Southeast Florida [here]. We have a Boys and Girls Club on the island. You can become a Guardian Ad Litem, a person who looks out for a child's interest in court [here].

As a citizen of a democracy you can tell our public servants not to cut funding to programs such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the Child Care and Development Block Grant, the Social Services Block Grant, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Medicaid. The same goes for Job Training and Employment Assistance, because helping their parents helps children. Only about 10% of the federal budget is spent on children. The most recent budget proposal would reduce that spending by 9% over the 10 year budget window. We like to say that children are our future. But as one young man said, that sounds like an excuse to put kids on the back burner and not deal with them now. Is neglecting the problems children are going through now a good way to ensure a better future for this country, much less the world?

I never finished reading the rest of Jeremiah 31:15-17. The whole passage goes: “This is what the Lord says, 'A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.' This is what the Lord says, 'Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work will be rewarded,' declares the Lord. 'They will return from the land of the enemy. So there is hope for your descendants,' declares the Lord. 'Your children will return to your own land.'”

Our God is the God of love. Our God is the God of life. Our God is the God of hope. With his help, we can give love and life and hope to all children.